Solicitor wrongly jailed for killing sons died from excess alcohol

The solicitor Sally Clark accidentally died from drinking too much alcohol as she struggled to deal with the traumatic experience of being wrongly convicted of killing her two baby sons, a coroner ruled yesterday.

Her case - and her sudden death at her Essex home in March - shone a stark spotlight on the reliability of expert medical witnesses and the lack of care offered to victims of miscarriages of justice.

The coroner, Caroline Beasley-Murray, said there was no evidence that Mrs Clark, 42, intended to commit suicide.

Mrs Clark was found guilty in 1999 of murdering eight-week-old Harry and 11-week-old Christopher within a period of 14 months. She served more than three years in prison before being cleared by the court of appeal in 2003 after evidence about the incidence of cot deaths was challenged.

Coroner's officer John Pheby told the inquest that postmortem tests showed she had a concentration of alcohol in her blood which would have made her more than five times the drink-drive limit - 428mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood.

A Home Office pathologist concluded that Mrs Clark had died as a result of acute alcohol intoxication. Mr Pheby told the hearing that Mrs Clark had tried to rebuild her life after being released from prison in January 2003 but had been diagnosed with a number of serious psychiatric problems. "These problems included enduring personality change after catastrophic experience, protracted grief reaction and alcohol dependency syndrome," he said.

Her husband, Stephen, did not attend the hearing. A family spokesman said afterwards: "Sally was unable to come to terms with the false accusations, based on flawed medical evidence and the failures of the legal system, which debased everything she had been brought up to believe in and which she herself practised."

At her trial, the paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow told jurors the probability of two natural, unexplained cot deaths in the family was 73m to one. The figure was later disputed by the Royal Statistical Society and other medical experts, who said the odds of a second cot death in a family were around 200 to one.

Mrs Clark lost her first appeal, but the second one heard that laboratory tests, commissioned by a Home Office pathologist on Harry, showed "lethal" levels of bacterial infection, indicating that his death may have been due to natural causes.

Sir Roy, now retired, later faced action from the General Medical Council and was struck off before winning an appeal against the decision.

John McManus, one of the founders of the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation, called for people in Mrs Clark's position to be given more support. He said: "In my opinion, this woman died of a broken heart and basically used alcohol to take away the horrors. Something like this was bound to happen.

"You get offered counselling after leaving the Big Brother television house and yet there's nothing for people like Sally Clark."